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by ameliapumo

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I know this souns dodgy, but I work for a charity and we have had a computer donated to us after an appeal in our local nerspaper (Nottingham Evening Ost, England)

Initially, the computer did not even power up, but after hep from and IT consultant we got it to power up, after changing power supply)

We can boot Windows XP into safe mode, but all diagnostic suggestions fail.

Although the original set up CD was donated along with the PC, there is no case with it

After consultation with the IT consultant, and other various test, it appeared that the hard drive had bad sectors on it, so we formatted the3 hard drive and then tried to reinstall WXP

However, we do not have the product key

We have rang the donors of the PC but they have disposed of all documentation apart from that which was given to us

We house 90+ homeless people and this computer is ideal to replace a very (1997) old PC that we use at present

Please can anyone help

NB Rung Microsoft but they are not prepared to help as they say key should be on sticker on actual PC - I know this to be the case, but in this instance there is no sticker. The donor of PC claims that he scrubbed it off and wrote key down, but has disposed of it ages ago when he bought a new PC (to replace the one he doated to the charity)

PLEASE HELP!!!!!

5 replies

by ameliapumo

I forgot to say that an image of the original HD is available, and also that the reason the PC was donated was because the original owner had the same problem in that he could only boot in safe mode, before the power supply went.

by dmiles

Try one of the following suggestions

RockXP - recover XP activation code

RockXP allows you to retrieve your XP product key that you used when you installed Windows XP. This can come very handy if you need to reinstall but have misplaced or lost the CD cover with the serial sticker.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/rockxp.html

You can use the net and download the utility Magic Jelly Bean utility to recover the Win XP product key,it has been featured in TechRepublic forum also under Discussions

I used viewXP Key successfully for the same thing. Use link below:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/ViewKeyXP.h tm

by ameliapumo

I managed to re-install windows Xp
Still smae problem - only safe mode

When it does the disk checking (blue screen it says disk needs to be checked for cosistency - it keeps listing various LOG files saying that the entry is invalid

If I cancel disk checking it starts to boot into Windows XP (normal boot) It gets past the black screen with Windows XP logo on it, then goes to the blue screen that says XP is starting up, then it goes to the BSOD blue screen colour, and says that Windows has been closed down as there is a problem with iesrpt.sys file and read only memory was trying to be accessed.

What can I do apart from getting a new hard drive?

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